Week 14 — Order, Amendment, and Address: Measuring the War for Freedom — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 13 of the term — measure the years between the war's documents, read three of them closely, and explain to someone new to history what the Emancipation Proclamation did and did not do.

This week you learned how the Union's resources set against the Confederacy's defense, how enslaved people freed themselves by fleeing to Union lines, what the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 did and did not free, how it differs from the 13th Amendment of 1865, how Black soldiers and sailors served after 1863, and why the Gettysburg Address has no single fixed text. In this assignment you work four short problems on the week's chronology, interpret each one, and explain to someone who has never studied it what the Proclamation did and did not do. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Primary Source Workshop practice the same ideas from other angles.

The task

Your shared data is four years from the course chronology, in order:

• 1857 — Dred Scott v. Sandford
• 1861 — Lincoln's First Inaugural Address
• 1863 — the Emancipation Proclamation (and the Gettysburg Address, given the same year)
• 1865 — the 13th Amendment ratified

Work these four problems, showing your arithmetic and citing your evidence:

1. Lincoln gave his First Inaugural Address in 1861, and he issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. How many years separate the two?
2. Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, and the 13th Amendment was ratified in 1865. How many years separate the two?
3. The Supreme Court decided Dred Scott v. Sandford in 1857, and Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. How many years separate the two?
4. Lincoln gave his First Inaugural Address in 1861, and the 13th Amendment was ratified in 1865. How many years does the week's record span?

Beside each answer, add one brief interpretation:

• Problem 1: Quote the First Inaugural's pinned fragment word for word with its document and year, then explain from that fragment why the war did not begin as a war for emancipation.
• Problem 2: Source the Emancipation Proclamation (type of document, host, and year) and quote the 1863 order's pinned fragment word for word, then tell the Proclamation apart from the 13th Amendment by saying what each did.
• Problem 3: State Dred Scott v. Sandford's holding from the record (both parts), then quote the preliminary proclamation's pinned fragment word for word and say where it sits in the 1863 document.
• Problem 4: Quote the Gettysburg Address's pinned fragment word for word with its document, year, and the text it comes from, and use the count of known manuscript copies to say why a careful reader names that text.

Explain it to a non-expert

A coworker says, "Lincoln freed every enslaved person in 1863, and the Civil War was about ending slavery from its very first day." Write a 3–5 sentence message that corrects both parts of that claim in everyday words, using this week's evidence about what the Proclamation did, what the 13th Amendment did, and what Lincoln said in 1861, and names one limit of what you can say after this week (for example, that the Proclamation shows what the order declared, not how enslaved people who fled to Union lines won freedom for themselves). Explain any technical term in everyday words. More than one good answer is possible.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a friend saying that a store sign reading "half off in the shoe department" meant everything in the store was half off, and that the store had always planned a sale. Model answer: "A sign covers only the places it names. This one names the shoe department, so the coats and hats kept their prices. The sign also tells us about the sale on the day it went up, not what the store planned when it opened. To know what a notice did, I read the places it lists and the date it carries, not what people remember about it."

Use that pattern for your message to the coworker, with your own wording and evidence.

Show your arithmetic and cite your evidence. A reader should be able to reproduce every number you report, and check every date and quoted word against Chapter 14, without guessing which values, steps, or sources you used.

Deliverables

Submit a single report containing:

• the four answers, each with the arithmetic shown and the brief interpretation the task names for that problem;
• your message to the coworker, correcting both parts of the claim in everyday words and naming one limit; and
• a one-line restatement of the values you used (the four years of the week's chronology), so your results are reproducible.

Keep it to roughly one page. Clear and correct beats long.

Choose how you show it. Present your report as written text, or as a recorded audio or video explanation of about three minutes with a transcript, or as a labelled timeline sketch that places the four documents and marks the 4 years from Lincoln's First Inaugural Address to the ratification of the 13th Amendment, with a short note. Every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

This version is designed to be completed without AI: do the computations, the interpretations, and the writing yourself, without a chatbot or other AI tool. Take every date and every quoted word from Chapter 14, and quote only the course's pinned fragments of the First Inaugural Address, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Gettysburg Address. Submitting AI-generated work as your own, or copying another student's work, is an integrity violation under the course policy.

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